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THANKSGIVING- FOJi VlCTOJrMlilS. 



DISCOUKSE 

BY 

REV. R. D. HITCHCOCK, D.D; 



"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my 
fingers to fight."— Psalm 144 : 1. 



Yoo can not have fiiiled to notice how small a 
part of the peculiar rhetoric of war has ever 
come from the great makers and masters of war. 
The contending heroes of the Iliad simply go 
out to meet each other under the walls of Troy. 
It is left for the poet to tell us how they rushed 
together like thunder -clouds in a summer sky. 
The nine campaigns of C;esar in Gaul turned out 
very much to his mind, but his own account of 
them in the Commentaries is probably not very 
much like the reports which would have been 
sent by the Roman Russell to the Roman Times, 
had Rome at that time either enjoyed or en- 
dured either a Russell or a Times. We have a 
General who threatens nothing more than to 
" move upon the works " of the enemy. For the 
" tornado " and " lightning " of the movement 
we are indebted to the sprightly correspondents, 
special or regular, who take no part in it only to 
see it. There is nothing strange in this, and 
nothing to be sneered at. Battles may be 
grand when looked at from afar, and grander 
still in tjieir results ; but to those who are in 
them they are hideous, and those who know the 
most about them are inclined to say the least. 
Louis Napoleon is said to have had his stomach 
turned, and his dreams badly haunted ever 
since, by the slaughter he witnessed at Solfe- 
rino. 

The author of the sentence chosen for our 
text to-day was at once a great poet and a great 
conqueror. When he received his kingdom, it 
was only a small fraction even of Palestine. 
And at last, after seven years, with all the 
Hebrews under him, it reached only to the 
roots of Lebanon on the north, touched the 
Arabian desert on the south, and went but little 



I beyond the Jordan on the east. But before he 
died, the Red Sea and the Euphrates were his 
boundaries, and there was no potentate any- 
where in Western Asia who did not tremble at 
the name of the shepherd's son of Bethlehem. 

Now what had this man to say of war ? 
Many things in many places, as he who runs 
may read, but in our text two things : Fii'st, 
virtually, that war is sometimes a good thing ; 
and, secondly, that success in it is of God. 
^"■Blessed be the Lord my strength, which 
teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to 
fight." 

To-day, at the suggestion of the President — 
the President of these nearly forty United States 
of North- America — we have thanked and are 
thanking God, thanking him in speech, and in 
feeling deeper than speech, for two most signal 
and pregnant victories : the one at Mobile on 
our Southern Gulf, where Army and Navy, 
planting the feet of our national power, the one 
upon the land, the other upon the sea, have had 
a united triumph ; thfe other at Atlanta in 
Georgia, where, after four months of incessant 
marching and fighting, a shell has been lodged 
at last in the very bowels of this monstrous Con- 
federacy. These are great victories, there can 
be no doubt of it ; as great as any in history. 
They do not end the rebellion, to be sure ; but 
they begin the ending of it. A few more such 
blows, and the work is substantially accom- 
plished. And so we bless God to-day, in this 
temple of peace, for these achievements of war, 
gratefully i-emembering the dead, tenderly 
mindful of the wounded and the bereaved, and, 
above all, humbly supplicating the Power above 
us for what further victories are needed to 



* Delivered in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, September 11th, 18(54, and publislied at the unanimous request/ 
of the congregation. " ' 






bring this great and sore struggle to a right- 
eous consummation, disband our brave and 
jiatient but wearied armies, and set in motion 
again the arrested currents of our ordinary life. 
"You can not regret more deeply than I that 
your own spiritual teacher is not here now to 
iead your devotions, and expound the lessons of 
the hour. And yet I will not distrust your 
charity, nor permit myself to be troubled by the 
fear tiiat you may be yearning for something 
better thaii you w"ill get. I am sm-e you will 
not be impatient with me for not doing better 
than I can, snatching time as I do for this dis- 
course from the grasp of other duties and other 
cares. 

I. Let me first speak to you about war in 
^'cneral. 

The Bible speaks of it in many, many places 
as one of the direst of calamities. Those who 
employ the Litany of the English Church pray 
every Sunday : "JFrom lightning and tempest; 
from plague, pestilence, and famine ; from hattle 
and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord 
dehver us." And such is the common feeling 
of civilized and cultured, to say nothing of re- 
generated and Christian, men. War, as I have 
said already, is a hideous thing. Our instincts 
are against it. As rational beings we resent 
this appeal from reason to the sword, from 
brain to muscle, as an atrocious indigiuty to 
reason itself. It makes us ashamed of men to 
see them hunting each other, as the sportsman 
hunts a tiger in the jungle ; to see them tear 
each other to pieces, as" tiger tears tiger when 
both are famished, and are both unwilling to 
dis-ide their spoil. Swords, and pistols, and 
muskets, and cannon, and bullets, and balls, and 
forts, and iron-plated ships, with all the other 
inventions which mean death to man, are more 
hatefid than any human abhorrence has ever 
painted them. War, in and of itself, in its last 
analysis, is simply butchery ; the butchery, not 
of soulless animals like sheep and oxen,,but of 
reasoning and immortal men. Shame on it all. 
And the greater the war, the greater the shame. 
In great, long wars, the waste of Ufe is frightful. 
Five millions of men, it is estimated, perished 
in the Crusades. An equal number of French- 
men fell victims to the military genius of the 
First Xapoleon. Farmers, mechanics, mer- 
chants, scholars, are torn away from their be- 
neficent pursuits to fatten corn-fields, as at Wa- 
terloo ; perhaps to be of less use even than that. 
And the gaps tlms made in society are not 
filled for a generation. And then there are 
multitudes on crutches, or maimed and limp- 
ing, till nature has had time to put them all 
under the sod. And then there are delicate 
women, dressed in black, in our sight for years, 
pensioned, it may be, meagerly, or it may be 
painfully living by the needle, making shirts 
at five cents apiece for men who had made for- 
tunes out of the war which cost them their hus- 
bands. And then there are Httle children to 
grow up, weeping every night when they are 
put to bed its they are told of their fathers, who 
had tlieir lives shot or stablied out of them on 
gome far off battle-Held, and whose l)odies are 
not asleep at home in the village graveyard. 
And then there is absolute aimihilalioii of prop- 



erty ; charcoal, niter, sulphur i\. the powder 
that is burnt ; lead and iron in the bullets and 
balls ; and a hundred other things, which get 
planted in every battle, not to grow, but to rot. 
Harvest-fields are trampled to mud, houses and 
barns are consumed, railways torn up, engines 
and cars demolished, ships sunk or set fire to 
with their cargoes, liglit-houses l:)lowu up, and 
harbors obstructed or destroyed. And then, 
too, there is great peril of serious damage to the 
moral character. There is the life in camp, 
away from all domestic endearments and re- 
straints ; and raids through hostile territory, 
sweeping property like whirlwinds ; and the 
fury of battle, so liable to kindle a thirst for 
blood, or at least to cheapen the value of hunuiu 
life. Such are some of the fruits and tokens of 
war. War means death and destruction : death, 
violent and sudden ; destruction, utter and irrep- 
arable. In this aspect of it, it is hard to im- 
agine any worse thing which could possibly 
happen. Satanic and hellish some men have 
called it. But Milton thinks otherwise, and 
worse, of it : 

" shame to men ! devil with devil damned 

Firm concord holds, men only disagree 

Of creatures rational." 

But bad as war is, some other tilings arc 
worse, immeasurably worse. And when war and 
any one of these other worse things is the only 
and enforced alternative, then is war a right and 
a good thing; with all its abominations it is 
right, with all its horrors it is good. War, we 
have said, is death and destruction ; but the 
death only of the body, the destruction only of 
property. Even at this, however, the loss is not 
so great as may at first appear. Death will 
come sooner or later to us all. The man who 
falls in battle only dies a little sooner than he 
expected. Property likewise is perishable. War 
only sweeps it away more swiftly. But rated 
at their highest value, neither life nor property 
should be thought inalienable. Life is sweet 
and pi-operty is good, but life and property may 
be too dearly ransomed. " What shall it profit 
a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and 
lose his own soul V " And souls may be lost 
without being sent to perdition beyond the 
grave ; reaching that perdition doubtless at last, 
but lost some time before. 

With respect to the Christian martyrdoms, I 
beUeve there is nowhere any debate. No man 
dares to say, if any man is mean enough to 
think, that those uncompromising saints who 
preferred death to apostasy, died fooHshly. That 
one early martyr at the stake in Smyrna, the 
aged Polycarj), states the case for them all. 
On his way to the fliunes, Herod, an official, 
with his father Nicetes, met him in their chariot. 
Lifting the venerable Bishop into the cliariot, 
they say : " What harm is there in it to say, 
Lord CcEsar, and sacrifice, and so be safe?" 
Afterward the proconsul urged him : " Swear, y 
and I will set thee at liberty ; reproach Christ." 
But his answer was : " Eighty and six years jiave 
I now served Christ, and he has never done me 
the least wrong; how, then, can I blasi)henie 
my King and my Saviour V " And so he lost a 
life wliicli a single sentence woidd have saved. 



3 



But so he won everlasting bliss in heaven, and 
on earth everlasting renown ; here the laurel, 
and there the palm. 

But it may be said that the difference is wide 
between yielding up one's own life and taking 
the life of another; between martyrdom and 
war. The coinniandnient i.-^, " Thou shalt not 
kill ;" and war, wo are told, is murder. But if 
mere killing be murder, ray reply is, then it is 
murder to hang a murderer ; as some, indeed, 
are quite ready to aflirm, denouncing scaffold 
and battle-field as alike unchristian. Tiiis is lo- 
gical, but false ; aright conclusion from a wrong 
premise. " Thou shalt not kill " does not mean, 
" Thou shalt not take away life." But, as ex- 
pounded by our Lord himself, its meaning is, 
" Thou shalt do no murder." Murder is more 

^ than killing. Killing is sometimes not merely a 
right, but a duty, even for individuals, as when 
one anticipates by a quick blow of his own tlie 
blow of^au assassin. And if an individual may 
take life in self-defense, much more may it be 
done by the body politic, with its formalities of 
arrest and trial. In the face of murder, trea- 
son, or any other capital offence, the command- 
ment is, "Thou shalt kill." Magistracy is no- 
thing without its sword. That sword may not 
always be reddened justly ; but justly reddened, 
it does the will of God, who complacently per- 
mits no magistrate to bear the sword in vain. 
Occasions arise when organized society must 
either kill or be killed itself; and organized 
society must not consent to die. 

Now war is nothing more nor less than capital 
punishment on a large scale : sometimes out- 
side, between nation and nation, when we call 
it foreign war ; sometimes inside, when we call 
it civil. The chief difference is, that on the 
scaffold there is but one executioner, while on 
the battle-field the executioners are many. In 
either case, it is the organized society that 
strikes, on the scaffold with its single hand of 
civil justice, on the field with its many mailed 
hands of war. But sheriff or soldier, it matters 
not, they are equally legitimate. War, then, 
witli all its evils, is not in itself wrong. In par- 
ticular instances it may be wrong, or it may be 
right; but each instance must be judged of by 
itself. Our proper rule of judgment would ap- 
pear to be, that war, to be righteous, must be 
always defensive war. Defensive, I mean, in 
spirit ; for it is obvious that a war may be of- 
fensive hi form, which is strictly defensive in 
spirit, as in the case of Charlemagne, who re- 
peatedly attacked and crippled the Barbarians, 
who were preparing to attack, and might have 
crippled, him. The alternative before him was 
not that of peace or war, but of war to-day or 
war to-morrow; and the choice he made was of 
war to-day. Offences have not yet ceased be- 
tween nation and nation, any more than they 
have ceased between man and man ; nor will 

>^ they cease for some time to come. Nation still 
insults and injures nation. The insulted and in- 
jured nation may exercise a long forbearance, 
protesting against its wrongs ; but there is a lim- 
it beyond which forbearance is not a virtue, but 
a crime. That hmit overstepped, of which the 
Christian conscience of the nation must calmly 
judge, then the blade nnist leave its scabbai'd, 



and the God of battles must he invoked to arbi- 
trate the conflict. International offenses, no 
longer endurable, must be punished. For some 
offenses, the lighter punishment of commercial 
non-intercourse may sulHce. But other offenses 
of a graver character cry aloud for the crown- 
ing punishment of war. And war for a nation's 
rights, when those rights are at once vital and 
jeopardized, is always a war of self-defense; in 
its essence that, whatever may be its form. 
Such war, we declare, is right. It is more than 
riglit : it is a duty. And the nation which shirks 
this duty deserves its inevitable doom ; I say, 
its inevitable doom, for whatever nation is afraid 
to fight, and is known to be afraid to fight, for- 
feits the respect of other nations and is near its 
end. The vultures will soon be screaming over it. 
But if a nation may defend itself on the out- 
side against foreign assailants, much more may 
a nation defend itself on the inside against do- 
mestic traitors and rebels. Civil war, as all the 
world knows, is worse than foreign war; as 
much worse as a wolf in the fold is worse than 
a wolf at the door. It is more ferocious and bit- 
ter in its spirit, more desolating in its effects. 
It furrows the land with a hotter plowshare, 
and plants it with larger armies of the slain. 
Its havoc, as in the last days of the Roman Re- 
public, as in the last days of the French Repub- 
lic, is often arrested only by the iron hand of a 
despot, enforcing order at the expense of ar,- 
cient liberties and rights. There are great mis- 
eries, and great risks. But when a wanton re- 
bellion, long brooded over, is at length hatched, 
when constitutional and peaceful methods of re- 
dress for alleged grievances are haughtily 
spurned, when the national flag is insulted, and 
the national authority defied, then civil waj- 
nmst come ; has, indeed, already come. It is 
the national life that is threatened : and if that 
life is worth having, it is worth defending. If 
there be fire in the nation's heart, that fire must 
burst and burn. If there be nerve in the na- 
tion's arm, that arm must strike. It is no long- 
er a question of parties, which shall rule, 
whether this or that, but the supreme and final 
question of life or death to the State itself. Un- 
resisted assassination is virtual suicide. A great 
nation has no right to die ; and the greater the 
nation, the greater the wrong of allowing itself to 
be made to die. Lost wealth may be shortly re- 
covered, slaughtered millions of men may by and 
by be replaced ; but the splendid living organism 
of a high-hearted, prosperous, puissant national- 
ity, with all its array of arts and industries, of laws 
and institutions, of grand historic memories and 
of still grander aspirations, which challenge the 
coming centuries, the dust of heroes in its soil, 
and the feet of heroes upon it, is no poor, easily 
accomplished work of man, but a slow growth 
of reluctant time, a wondrous miracle of Provi- 
dence, which may not be witnessed again on the 
same spot for ages. It must not be suffered to 
perish. By all that is sacred in heaven, by all 
that is brave, sweet, and precious on earth, by 
the sleeping ashes of the fathers, by tlie cradles 
of the children, by all the examples of the past, 
by all the prowess of the present, by all the pro- 
phetic visions of the future, it must not be suf- 
fered to nerish. 



But war, in such emergencies as we liave 
HOW considered, has also another aspect than 
this of tragic and terrible necessity. It has its 
compensations, greatest always in the greatest 
and grandest conflicts, whi^li go fur to make 
us bless oven the bitterness of the bud for the 
sweetness of the flower. If war, by withdraw- 
ing largely the muscle of a country from pro- 
ductive i)ursuits to a pursuit whose very genius 
is destructiou, deranges business, choking up 
the old channels of trade, it, on the other hand, 
opens new ciiannels of its own. Armies must 
be clothed, and sheltered, and nourished ; navies 
must be launched; and iron throats on the land 
and on the sea must be fed witli powder, and 
lead, and iron. And, above all, if men are 
mowed down l)y regiments, and sorrow carried 
to innumerable homes, yet heroes are made for 
history, and the life of the nation is enriched by 
the lives of its champions. If some weak 
statesmen are broken down by the burden, 
others are found to bear it. If frogs croak, and 
wise owls hoot, in the night of disaster, birds of 
promise come singing in the morning. If some 
moral interests are imperiled, others and great- 
er ones are promoted. What would England 
liave been to-day without her righteous wars, 
domestic and foreign ? England, or any other 
of the first nations of Europe ? What but " a 
nation of shopkeepers ;" a swarm of bees, hiving 
their honey; a herd of cattle, chewing their 
cuds ? That is a great day for a man, when he 
puts his life in peril for a principle. That is a 
great day for a people, when they stand up for 
their rights. As men now are, and as the 
world now goes with them, a long peace, such 
;w the merchant prays for, is more dangerous to 
the soul than battles are to the body. Peace is 
a hot summer, teeming with life, and hurrying 
its crops to ripeness, but drying up the brooks, 
wrapping the land in smoke, and robbing the 
air of its tonics. War is lightning. And light- 
ning is good. It may kill a horse or two in the 
pasture, or burn a barn, or prostrate a man 
•Standing in his doorway, or, striking a church, 
may turn, for some months, a Christian congre- 
gation quite out of doors ; but it clears the air, 
and without it we should none of us have long 
to live. 

War, then, with all the losses and horrors that 
attend it, with all the sorrows that follow it, is 
not always to be denounced, is not always to be 
shunned. King David was no stranger to war, 
making verses about it from afar. The nations 
round about him would not let him alone in Pales- 
tine. His own sons stirred up rebellions against 
him. And so he became a warrior, fighting for 
his kingdom and his crown; warrior, as well as 
lyrist, singing as he returned from victory : 
" Blessed be the Lord my strength, which 
teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to 
fight." 

II. Let me next speak to you about the secret 
of success in war. 

Napoleon is commonly reported to have .said 
that Providence is always on the side of the 
heaviest battalions. I am slow to believe he 
ever said it. He must have known better, for 
be was not ignorant of history. The fact is, 
rathrr that the heaviest liiittalions arc ;ilwavs on 



' the side of Providence ; not, I admit, in all the 
j preliminary or incidental skirmishes, not in all 
the smaller battles even, but certainly in all the 
greater, decisive battles which have settled any 
thing worth settling. Many a time have little 
armies beaten large armies ; as at Marathon and 
Platsca, the Greeks the Persians, who outnum- 
bered them as ten to one. Wiio knows, or can 
know, which are the heaviest battalions, till it 
be found out which did the crushing, and which 
were crushed ? David, though a stripling, was 
taller than Saul, and weighed more than Goliath. 
But his stature was not in inches by the rule, 
nor his weight in ounces by the scales. The 
Kearsarge and Alabama were more nearly 
matched than is often the case in naval engage- 
ments of that sort. As they steamed towards 
each other, with sanded decks and shotted guns, 
it would have been difficult to determine which "*• ^ 
was the better ship, or which was the better 
equipped, officered, and manned. An hour later 
it was all plain enough. No intelligent man in 
Christendom now needs to be told which ship 
went down, nor why. Patriotism commanded 
and worked the one ; piracy commanded and 
worked the other. 

One of the finest sayings of modern literature 
is that of Schiller: "The world's history is the 
world's judgment." It condenses into a proverb 
the whole philosophy of history. And yet, 
nearly three thousand years before, another poet 
had written: "I said unto the fools, Deal not 
foolishly : and to the wicked. Lift not up the 
horn : lift not up your horn on high : speak not . 
with a stiff neck. For promotion cometh neither 
from the east, nor from the west, nor from the 
south. But God is the judge : he putteth down 
one, and setteth up another." For us, as indi- 
viduals, there is a great day of judgment to 
come, with trumpet of archangel, and banner of 
flame, and book of God's memory and ours. 
But for races and nations, th6 day of judgment, 
like Elias to the Hebrews hundreds of years ago, 
is come already. It has come, and stays. It is 
now, and always. From the moment a nation is 
born, from that moment it begins to be judged. 
Nations, indeed, are free, liking what they will, 
and doing what they like. Hence, as human 
nature is always the same, human events are al- 
ways repeating themselves. There is nothing 
new under the sun ; but ever the same old cir- 
onit of growth and decay, of conquest and de- 
feat. So at first it seems, and so in part, but 
only in part, it is. Besides the movement 
round, there is another movement onward, 
making the circuits spiral. And that spiral 
movement is of God, impelling the nations on- 
ward, while they go spinning round and round. 
The gOiil we know : it is the final triumph here 
on earth of truth and right over lies and wrong. 
Towards that goal the revolving nations have al- 
ways pointed their fingers, and have always 
moved. I am not addressing atheists, and there- 
fore I shall not now undertake to prove that the •) ■ 
law of history is not revolution only, but also 
progress. Suffice it here to say, that the vindi- 
cation of our Christian philosophy of history is 
the whole substance of history itself, its woof 
and its warp. Since the fall of man, which had 
it.s organic culmination in tlie godless civilization 



of Adain's eldest son, as f\ir back as we cim see •* 
through the eyes of Herodotus, as far back as we \ 
can see through the eyes of Jloses, the world has ! 
not revolved oulv, but also advanced. Not always I 
from generation to generation, but always from i 
age to age, fi'om great epoch to great epoch, has 1 
there been one steady march. Any school-boy I 
will recite you the names and the dates. Egypt, ' 
Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, 1 
Macedon, and Rome, those names of the old cm- i 
pires, all witnesses to progress, all witnesses for 
God, that he has ruled amongst the nations, and 
compelled them, in the working out of their own 
ambitious purposes, also to work out his pur- 
poses of justice and of grace. Amidst those older 
empires, Palestine stood central. For hundreds 
of years five millions of Hebrews determined the 
course of history. It was to train, to try, and j 
finally to punish them, that those empires came 
and went. And now it is the son of a Hebrew 
mother, who is also the Son of God, around 
whom the nations revolve, and whose purposes 
they execute, whether they will or no. His 
kingdom, set up eighteen hundred years ago, has 
been steadily growing ever since. It is stronger 
to-day than ever it was before. It will be 
stronger to-morrow than it is to-day. Greece 
helped it in her decrepitude, and died only when 
she could help it no longer. Rome also helped 
it, and Rome also died when she could help it no 
longer. And so of all the nations since : the 
empire of Charlemagne, the medieval kingdoms 
of Europe, the empires of the two Napoleons, 
and all the rest. Each has had its own inspira- 
tion, each its own aims, but of God all liave 
had only one and the same errand, and all have 
either bowed or been broken, will bow or will be 
broken, beneath the weight of Ciirist's arm. By 
the eternal covenant of redemption, this world is 
Christ's. He died for it, and he will have it. 
The past guarantees the future. Since those 
tongues of flame at Pentecost till now, not a 
single important event has happened which has 
not done something towards bringing in the pro- 
mised millennium. Every national birth and 
every national death, every revolution and every 
reform, every discovery and every conquest, 
every invention and every battle, every science 
and every art, has had its Christian errand, and 
has (lone it. The Roman Empire built roads for 
the feet of the apostles and early evangelists, and 
kept order in their assemblies. Charlemagne 
repeated in northern Europe the southern em- 
pire of the Caasars. Priests and schoolmen re- 
deemed the Middle Ages from utter barbarism. 
Then out of the feudal chaos sprang the modern 
kingdoms of Europe, which, for these last three 
centuries, have been elaborating the Christian 
civilization that now rules the world. Study 
closely this chart of history, tracing the career 
of every nation and of every great ruler of every 
nation, and you will find but one key to the 
problem of their fortunes. The race has not 
been to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 
But the blood of Christ has been beating in the 
arteries of the world. Truth, right, law, liberty — 
these have been the light and the life of men, 
making the foolish wise, and the weak strong, so 
that one has been able to chase a thousand, and 
two have put ten thousand to flight. 



And of all the methods employed to bring the 
world right, there is none, perhaps, more effect- 
ive, surely none so imposing, as this war. It i:-. 
indeed, a rough method, the delight of thr 
savage, tlie dread of the civilized, and yet the 
appointment of Providence as the indispensable 
condition of human progcsss. The onward move- 
ment of the race has been always, not a journey, 
but a march. The new territories have had to 
be conquered. Wiser laws, humaner institutions, 
liberties enlarged and chartered, order assured — 
these all have been the crimsoned trophies of 
war. Even peace itself has had to be purchased 
with blood and tears. And so it is that the 
great military campaigns of history are its great 
waymarks. The gieat battles are but .synonyms 
of great ideas realized. It is no new thing for 
bayonets to think ; they have always thought, 
thinking better and better from ago to age. It 
is the brains behind the bayonets that are think- 
ing now. The devil rages, but God reigns ; and 
what is best for man is sure to win in the long 
run. " He always wins who sides with God." 
In the great crises of history, when the clock of 
the universe is about to strike a new houi-, it 
matters not what splendor or genius in leader- 
ship, whac weight of massed column.s^ what 
prodigality of preparation, what prestige of pre- 
vious achievement, may be set in array against 
the right ; unseen squadrons are in the air 
above, unseen chariots in the mountains I'ound 
about, and the battle is the Lord's — both the 
battle and the victory. Napoleon could never 
understand why his army was routed at Water- 
loo. By all military precedent, the rout should 
have been upon the other side. Napoleon was 
never surer of victory than then. But besides 
the army against him on the ground, there was 
another army against him in the air. The stai's 
in their courses fought against him, and he was 
vanquished. A bad cause may be successful at 
the start. Inspired from beneath, and not from 
above, its fire is fierce and withering ; but it 
fights too fast and wildly. The good cause is 
stunned and staggered by the first onset ; but 
by and by it rallies, warming as it works, and 
striking harder and harder till the field is won. 

How it comes to pass that the good cause at 
last carries the day, every good man knows, or 
ought to know. This secret of the Lord is with 
them that fear him. Every soldier in the field 
has an ally in every Christian closet ; and he 
knows it. Every tent-tire blazes with the light 
of remembered hearth-stones. Every peal of the 
buglo is trenmlous with the voices of wives and 
children. Every battle has its benediction from 
every altar of worship. And every triumph shall 
have its anthems from generation to generation. 
Good men thus armed are invincible. We need 
not await the bulletins ; the end is sure. 

III. And now let me say a few words about 
our own war. 

We are tired of hearing it called gigantic j 
that word has been used so much. And yet 
the fact remains of a great war ; the greatest 
perhaps, in history. I need not tell you how 
great it is : great in the length and breath of 
its theater; great in its host lof armed men 
upon the land, great in it* fleets upon the sea, 
great in its cost of treasui'e, great in it:: c.st of 



hlood. So E;real is it, tliat bad its (linii'iisioiis 
l)ecn foreseen, the heart of the nation woidd 
have failed it. So great is it, that the liearts of 
many men liave f.iiled them as it is. So great 
is it, that only the most vivid sense of the 
still greater issues at stake in it will suffice to 
bear us through. 

Cries of peace are on tho wind. We heard 
them at the start. We have heard them all 
along. AYe hear them now louder than ever. 
But cries of peace from whom, and to whom? 
Some arc the prayers of all the saints ascend- 
ing since tlie war began, that God will be 
plea.sed, in his own good time,, to send us peace 
by righteousness, that so it may be a lasting 
peace. But no cry is heard as yet from the 
rebels in arms, who might have peace to-mor- 
row, by simply throwing down their weapons 
and striking their flag. No cry as yet from our 
own brave boy.«, their blue jackets fragrant 
with the smell" of victories. No cry from the 
bloody graves of fallen heroes, who would as 
gladly fight and die again for the old flag. No 
cry even from widows and orphans, who have 
lo.st all they had to lose, and now only pray it 
may not have been in vain. Nowhere any cry 
'do we hear, but from the lips of rebels not in 
arms, or who, if not rebels, arc the dupes and 
the tools of rebels, doing the work of rebels, and 
doing it better now and here than though they 
had followed their hearts down over the lines. 
These are the men who now cry for peace at 
any price, peace on the instant by the ground- 
ing of our arms, when they know, some of 
them better even than we — for they have learn- 
ed it from Richmond — that the rebellion is on 
the verge of grounding its arms. Peace, they 
cry, as over a drawn battle, when they know 
the battle is nearly finished in victory. Peace, 
they cry, when they know that peace now, with- 
out another blow, would be substantially the 
triumph of our foes. Some of these men who 
cry for peace are bold, bad men ; as bold and 
as bad as Catiline. Others are only sensual 
and sordid, not willing to pay blood and gold for 
truth, freedom, and righteousness. Others are 
only timid, shrinking from further trial. 
Others, tired but not timid, are only mistaken, 
honestly thinking the war can be ended in no 
other way. Others, again, are only the rank 
and file of old political organizations, who 
know no other voice than that of their old 
shepherds. Taking them all together, their 
name is legion. They are found in all portions 
of the loyal States, and in nimibers are prob- 
ably about as strong, relatively, as the Tories of 
the Revolution ; perhaps a little stronger. 
They are now, by the coufes.«ion of the rebels 
themselves, the forlorn hope of their Confi^d- 
eracy. Foreign intervention was abandoned 
long ago as an idle dream. The rebellion is 
standing literally on its last legs ; it has con 
scripted every thing it could lay its hands on 
that could be of any use to it between the 
cradle and the grave. The recruiting drum- 
Ijo.at would not be more out of place in the 
churchyards tUan in the streets of most of the 
Southern towns. A few thousands of men 
more on our side, and the thing is ended. 
Peace would then come, not by an armistice. 



which would lead to no peace that could last, 
but by victories so overwhelming and conclusive 
that no man anywhere would dare to challenge 
the result. So says the Lieutenant-Genoral of 
our armies, God bless him for his sublime 
tenacity of purpose, for his steadfast faith, for 
his many victories. So say all our best generals. 
So say all our best soldiers. And the rebels 
know it to be true. Only one hope now sus- 
tains them, and that is their hope of seeing yet, 
at the eleventh hour, a divided and palsied 
North. 

Shall they see it ? Tell me. Christian friends 
and neighbors, tell me, my fellow-countrymen, 
shall they see it ? This is now the grand ques- 
tion before us. And it is the only question. 
The question of slavery, in its relations to our 
politics, our industry, our religion even, is just A. 
now supremely impertinent: impertinent, I 
say, not because slavery can be cleared of the 
guilt of this rebellion, or can be thought com- 
patible with the revived prosperity and perma- 
nent peace of the Republic, or can be looked 
upon with moral indifference by moral men ; 
but simply because, by its own act, it now lies 
at the mercy of events which must have their 
course. Of the four millions of Southern 
bondmen at the beginning of this rebellion, 
more than one million — Mr. Davis has said 
nearly two millions — have been freed alreaxly. 
Others yet will snatch their freedom as our 
armies advance. And they would have snatched 
it all the same had there been no Proclamation 
of 1863. That military edict is, therefore, but 
a poor apology for turning against the Govern- 
ment now. Beyond all controversy, it has 
weakened the rebellion, and strengthened the 
Government ; weakened the rebellion by mak- 
ing emancipation, not merely a military inci- 
dent, but a well-advised and avowed purpose, 
in order to the quicker and surer triumph of 
our arms ; strengthened the Government by all 
the thousands of colored troops now in its 
service, by arraying on our side the sympathies 
of the best men in p]urope, and securing for 
ourselves the inspiration, not of patriotism 
alone, but also of philanthropy and the fear of 
God. To reenslave these freedmen would be 
not merely infamous, it would be insane. 
These, then, are wholly out of the problem. 
The eagles are uncaged, and gone. What 
shall be done with such as may not have been 
actually liber.ated along the paths of our armies, 
what shall be done with the institution of 
slavery itself — these are questions of tlie future, 
questions to be taken up and disposed of after 
the war is ended, and the Union, which, accord- 
ing to the loyal theory of the war, has never 
been dissolved, shall have been in fact restore<l. 
For the future, the immediate future, to which 
they belong, they are questions of the gravest 
moment. Perhaps we shall all soon feel them 
to be the crucial questions of our destiny. 
Perhaps the hour is nearer than some of us ' 
suppose, when the whole nation .shall be stand- 
ing in awe of Ilim whose office it is to say, 
Inasmuch as ye have done it, or have not done 
it, unto one of the least of those my brethren, 
ye have done it, or have not done it, unto me. 
I5ut just at lliis most crilical eoiijunctm-e of 



our affairs— just eincrgiiig, xs \vc aro, from the 
lowest depths of our despoudeney, the national 
brain oppressed, the national jjulsc fevorisli, and 
the spirits of mischief busy as never before — 
these questions are not in time. Tiic only 
question no\y, if we are wise, is the question of 
ivar or ar7)iistice. This is the question offered 
us. Let us aecept it, and iiold its apostles to it, 
and hold ourselves to it, and hold each other to 
it, and hold the nation to it. If Ajax fails of 
victory for want of liglit, bo it no fault of 
ours. 

Annisiicc is the watch-word. But what is 
armistice ? Not peace ; only hostility suspended. 
But hostility suspended in order to peace, they 
toil us. 15c not" deceived, my countrymen. 
Peace will never come in this way. The rebel- 
lion is still in arms, engineered and dominated 
j^ by able and desperate men, who have sworn, 
with an oath as stern as that of the famous 
Belenda est Carthago, that the old Union shall 
never be reestablished. This explains the re- 
mark of Mr. Davis, that they "are not fighting 
for slavery, and care very little about it." lie 
did not mean that they are sick of the institu- 
tion, and ready to give it up. He only meant, 
although of course too shrewd to own to it, 
that, with their independence established, and 
an open sea between themselves and the dusky 
continent, they will know how to make good 
the losses of the war. They are inflexibly re- 
solved upon an independent Confederacy ; and 
if, with their armies so well in hand, they can 
hold the Southern masses to that programme to- 
day, with those armies refreshed and le-supplied, 
they will be able to hold these same masses to 
that same programme to-morrow. The armistice 
will end, as it began, in an unqualified and 
stubborn demand for independence. They say 
they want nothing else, and will think of noth- 
ing else. If their demand be refused — as re- 
fused it must be, for I have read in a recent 
document that '' the Union must be preserved 
at all hazards " — then it will be war again, only 
worse, and less likely by a thousand fold to 
end propitiously th.an now. If the demand be 
conceded, there may, indeed, be peace for a 
time, but war again after a season, and war for 
ever, till either our descendants learn the wis- 
dom now offered to us, or the continent is black 
with ruins. What man in his senses can im- 
agine for a moment the possibility of perma- 
nent amity, or any thing hke it, between two such 
governments as would take the place of the one 
government now battling for its life ? What 
man that wishes to plant, or spin, or trade, or 
study, would be willing to stay amidst such 



uncertainties as would then be chronic ? 
What mother would be willing to lunse her 
babe amidst such alarms as then would be near- 
ly constant ? Or is it sui)posed that there is 
still at the South a latent majority in favor of 
the old Union, who need only to be conciliated, 
who ask for a suspension of hostilities only that 
they may rid themselves of their present rul- 
ers and resume their place under the old flag? 
If there be any such latent majority, from what 
I know of human nature, I do not believe, for 
one, that they will either respect or like us any 
the less for having cut up this rebellion root 
and branch ; a rebellion, with respect to which 
the chief question now is and ever will be, 
whether its rank is highest among the great 
historic blunders or among the great historic 
crimes. 

No, my friends and countrymen, this pro- 
posed armistice will never do. After it would 
be the deluge. There is but one way of peace, 
and this is not it. The owl's eye hath not seen 
it ; but i'arragut hath found it upon the sea ; 
and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan have 
found it upon the land. It is war ; war with 
all our might now for a few weeks longer, till 
every rebel army is scattered, and our long- 
oppressed brethren of the South, insurgent 
against the leaders by whom they have been 
betrayed almost to utter ruin, cast those lead- 
ers down and sue for peace. Then shall we 
have peace indeed ; thoroughly conquered, and 
sure to last. Doth any man deny, or doubt, 
the possibility of a conquered peace? He 
must be either a very disingenuous or a very 
dull student of history. History knows no 
other peace worth having than a conquered 
peace. 

Such a peace is now possible to us. We have 
but to put forth our hands to it, hands clad in 
steel, and it is ours ; ours, and our children's, 
for ever and for evermore. Then shall this 
continent, having ended its old life after the 
flesh, enter upon its new life after the spirit. 
We shall be cured of much that is now our 
weakness and our shame. With more and 
more of wealth, we shall be more and more 
mindful of its highest uses. With more and 
more of power, we shall be less and less boast- 
ful of it. Our soil, made sacred by such a bap- 
tism of fraternal blood, we shall tread more 
reverently ; and this soil shall be too sacred for 
the feet of slawis. Christ himself shall sit reg- 
nant over us. Now he sends us the sword, 
because of oui- manifold offenses ; but then 
will he give us peace. 



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